
' History https://www.gutenberg.org/files/55901/55901-h/55901-h.htm', Edinburgh Review (May 1828)
Source: Stranger in a Strange Land
' History https://www.gutenberg.org/files/55901/55901-h/55901-h.htm', Edinburgh Review (May 1828)
pg. 339
The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England (1801), Christmas
Nobel Prize autobiography (1998)
Context: I realized that nature is filled with a limitless number of wonderful things which have causes and reasons like anything else but nonetheless cannot be forseen but must be discovered, for their subtlety and complexity transcends the present state of science. The questions worth asking, in other words, come not from other people but from nature, and are for the most part delicate things easily drowned out by the noise of everyday life.
Source: Orlando: A Biography (1928), Ch. 2
Context: At the age of thirty, or thereabouts, this young Nobleman had not only had every experience that life has to offer, but had seen the worthlessness of them all. Love and ambition, women and poets were all equally vain. Literature was a farce. The night after reading Greene's Visit to a Nobleman in the Country, he burnt in a great conflagration fifty-seven poetical works, only retaining 'The Oak Tree', which was his boyish dream and very short. Two things alone remained to him in which he now put any trust: dogs and nature; an elk-hound and a rose bush. The world, in all its variety, life in all its complexity, had shrunk to that. Dogs and a bush were the whole of it.
“Music is the only language in which you cannot say a mean or sarcastic thing.”
“Americans do seem to say things which make the English notice England.”
Source: I Capture the Castle
“Where subtlety fails us we must simply make do with cream pies.”
Source: The Uplift War
Source: Everyday Irrationality: How Pseudo-Scientists, Lunatics, and the Rest of Us Systematically Fail to Think Rationally (2001), Chapter 2, “Irrationality Has Consequences” (p. 24)